Digital Democracy and Digital Authoritarianism: Paderborn University’s INNOVADE Research Team’s Panel at the IAMCR 2026 Conference
Paderborn University’s INNOVADE research team (Prof Christian Fuchs, Joel Museba, Kevin Friesch) organised a panel at the 2026 conference of the
International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). The panel title was “Participatory Democracy and Participatory Fascism in the Age of Digital Capitalism”. The focus was on the role of participation in digital democracy and digital authoritarianism. The three researchers were joined in the session by Prof Jack L Qiu, who is Shaw Foundation Professor in Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in Singapore.
Christian Fuchs outlined how contemporary (digital) authoritarianism works, what roleparticipation plays in it, its political economy context, and how democratic alternatives can look like and be achieved. He argued that notions such as participation, grassroots democracy, alternative media, citizen journalism, the public sphere, etc. have become ideologically subsumed under the logic of authoritarianism. Joel Museba outlined how participatory democracy theory matters in the context of digital media. He argued that participatory digital democracy requires resources, time, the extension of democracy from politics to society, online/offline-combinations, and constitutional safeguards. Kevin Friesch presented the INNOVADE project’s six digital democracy models and four digital futures scenarios that the Paderborn team constructed in order to try to strengthen our imagination about how the futures of digital society could look like. Jack Qiu argued that South and Southeast Asia have long served as laboratories for digitally mediated populism and extremism. He showed that Asian digital extremism often cloaks itself in cultural, ethnic, or religious idioms. Social media examples that Qiu presented included antiRohingya Facebook groups in Myanmar, Duterteera vlog networks in the Philippines, Malay Power Telegram channels in Malaysia, and antisemitic or antiIslamic Discord groups.
The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) was founded in 1957 with UNESCO support. With 1,700 participants, the Galway conference was IAMCR’s largest conference thus far. The panel, chaired by Fuchs, was part of IAMCR’s Political Economy Section’s conference stream. Political Economy is one of the largest IAMCR-sections and a vivid international community of scholars who are interested in the interaction of media politics and media economics. The section has been active since 1978. Qiu and Fuchs have been co-operating since a long time, for example as co-editors of the Journal of Communication’s 2018 special issue “Ferments in the Field: The Past, Present and Future of Communication Studies”. Journal of Communication is one of the world’s leading and most highly ranked journal in the field of Media and Communication Studies.
The panel pointed out the importance of studying the continuities and changes of authoritarianism and democracy, how digital technologies act as mediators of participatory authoritarianism and participatory democracy, and taking a critical and internationally comparative approach. The panel’s insights are in line with the five tendencies that Qiu and Fuchs outlined in the Journal of Communication-special issue as important characteristics of contemporary Media and Communication Studies: (a) Communication Studies on a global scale, (b) the importance of researching communication in the fast-changing digital media environment, (c) the importance of Critical Communication Studies, (d) the new critical and materialist turn, and (e) praxis communication and the analysis of power imbalances in knowledge production.
Recommended reading:
Christian Fuchs & Jack L. Qiu. 2018. Ferments in the Field: Introductory Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Communication Studies. Journal of Communication 68 (2): 219-232. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy008